The darkFlash i5 Phantom Gaming PC: Build Breakdown

We gathered together some of the best tech from darkFlash, including the Phantom Black ATX case and DT240 AIO CPU cooler, to build the beautiful darkFlash i5 Phantom Gaming PC. With an RTX 2060 ASUS Turbo GPU and an Intel i5-9400F, the darkFlash i5 Phantom is more than just a lightshow. It looks great, runs cool, and is an all-around fantastic addition to our lineup of beautiful gaming PCs.

DarkFlash is a relatively new player in the PC case scene, but they’re making a serious first impression.

We wanted to put together a gaming build that would showcase what darkFlash does best- keeping your PC’s thermals in the sweet spot, while lighting up your life with all the rainbows.

This…is the darkFlash i5 Phantom gaming PC.

Housing all this sweet gaming tech is the darkFlash Phantom Black ATX case. This beast of a chassis puts cooling front and center, with support for pretty much any combination of fans you can think of. The case is designed to maximize airflow, as you can see. The Phantom comes with four 120 millimeter RGB fans on the front, and two more in the back, already installed and ready to go.

Once you remove the tempered glass panel, you’ll see how much space we’re working with here. With a maximum CPU cooler height of 155 millimeters, and support for a 350 millimeter GPU, you’ll have plenty of space for even the beefiest hardware.

A gaming rig isn’t much good without a graphics card. For our GPU, we went with the Nvidia powered RTX 2060 ASUS Turbo. This 2060 GPU hits the perfect balance of cost to performance. You’ll get the high frame rates and clock speeds you’d expect from a 20 series card, along with sweet new tech like Ray Tracing…all at a great price point.

The heart of this build, or the brain really, is Intel’s i5-9400F CPU in a ASUS WS Z390 PRO motherboard. Like the GPU, the i5 line of processors are a great balance of power and affordability, and are a perfect choice for a mid or high-range gaming build.

The i5-9400F is one of the most affordable six-core CPUs out there, partly because it doesn’t include integrated graphics. If you’re serious about gaming you’re going to need a graphics card anyway, so for most people, this is a great fit. The i5-9400F also supports all of Intel’s latest and greatest 9th gen tech, including Optane.

To keep your CPU running at peak performance, you have to keep that silicon cool. That’s where the darkFlash DT240 All In One cooler comes in. Not only does it add a splash of color to your build with brilliant RGB LEDs, the two 120 millimeter fans efficiently transfer the heat from the aluminum radiator out of your case. This means your CPU will always be at the top of its game, no matter how hard you push it.

Speaking of keeping cool, that brings us up to…let’s see…eight fans in total? That’s what we like to see. We finished off the build with an Intel M.2 SSD for storage, alongside 32GB of RAM and an 850 watt power supply, both from Corsair.